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Monday, January 28, 2013

Something Different #2

I originally submitted this story fragment to a competition organized by "Reading the Lines: "the Other" in the stories we tell about ourselves," a project funded by UNDP-ACT and run by the Cyprus Association on Books for Young People.Even though it did not make the final cut, I thought I'd share it with you in this second installment of "Something Different."

The perfect first sentence
never came easily to Samuel. He spent hours planted on a creaky mahogany stool
as inadequate words tumbled onto A4 sheets of scrap paper and his green pen
doodled them out of their misery. Instead of crumpling up each failed attempt,
pages full of angry scratches, cartoonish faces and repetitive patterns became
airplanes (The Moth, The Stealth!) that glided out the only window of his sixth
floor studio. Often, Samuel peered over the ledge until his words disappeared
behind other soot-laden buildings or dived down like a kamikaze onto the sidewalk
below. He then returned to his messy Davenport desk and the stacks of paper
waiting to be weighed down by his fickle scribbling.

Telling people about Candela’s
murder only made things harder. His memory of her unveiled itself and drowned
out any semblance of a thought process. A humid midnight inside Club “La Venia.”
High-heeled women in flowing dresses skipped to the Nuyorican salsa, their partners biting their own
lower lips and spinning the girls around like flimsy tops. Cheap watered-down
rum and light beer spilled out of plastic tumblers, and the strobe lights raced
against the brass section’s trilling. Samuel held Candela close on the dance
floor, peppering her chocolate-toned neck with short kisses and naked toes with
untrained footsteps.

Caption to be used as "inspiration."

He creased another page and
ventured towards the window. A gust of wind swept the plane (The Arrow, The
Dart!) and it spun uncontrollably and darted the roof of a parked white sedan. Part
of him believed the city would collect his sophomoric language, recycle it and reward
him with a more promising beginning. Samuel imagined garbage men in their
fluorescent yellow vests, grey rubber boots and unbecoming smell spearing his aeronautical
origami with their paper pick-up sticks and tossing them into the dumpster, a ravenous
mouth that opened wide and spat out words threaded together like dense Zardozi
embroidery. As the city was cleansed each dawn of its impurities, so too he
thought was his inability to move past unlocked.

Candela and Samuel walked
arm in arm, the music’s beat long gone from their bodies but that anxiety that
comes with first-time love creeping in as a warm light through cracked blinds. A
gang of miscreants, five lanky men with grimy tattoos that rolled from under
their tight white t-shirts like sinister clouds, accosted them four blocks away
from Samuel’s studio. They heckled Candela, mocking her wide hips, her burnt
wheat complexion, the unusual staccato of her pleas. Two of them locked Samuel
from his neck and waist and forced him to watch. The skinny bald one with red
wire-rimmed glasses and swastikas patched onto his militaristic cargo pants belted
out obscenities, smacked Candela across her teary face and tugged at her
obsidian, iron-straightened hair. Ad nauseam, he yelled that Candela (The Black
Bitch!) did not belong. The other two cackled and joined in on their twisted
version of social justice. An unsettling fog moved in as if commandeered by
evil. Samuel sobbed and with little fight left in him resigned himself to a
life removed from the garrulous Latina he loved.

With a thick black permanent
marker, he spelled out H-A-T-EC-R-I-M-E on the back of an outdated Cantonese
take-out menu. Samuel carefully folded the food-stained sheet into an origami balloon
(The Balloon!) and set it on the windowsill. One quick flick and the cube
disappeared. As a journalist, understanding and deconstructing run-of-the-mill
crimes was effortless. Albeit, the sheer hate evinced that moist night latched
onto him unexplained—the beasts’ foaming mouths and bloodshot eyes, their song
and dance of reproach, that inhumane and senseless attack on difference. The
emergency room’s doctors proclaimed Candela dead at four thirty-three a.m. yet
Samuel only found out hours later under a haze of painkillers and covered in bulky
bloodied bandages.

Her funeral amassed hordes
of distraught people—friends, family, co-workers, salseros and bachateros
and former lovers, many of whom entertained the noble but irresponsible idea of
playing vigilante for a night and disemboweling Candela’s murderers. The
cassocked priest spoke about tolerance and love and forgiveness, and the
mourning crowd let out several high-pitched and offbeat Hallelujahs. A collection
of medium-sized balloons, each one a different color and marked with single
words describing the deceased, took to the sky and slowly floated west. A
morose Samuel sat by the closed casket, his scarlet and fern green scarf
wrapped clumsily around his neck and a three-day scruff spreading like crab
grass across his dislocated jaw. No one heard him mumble that afternoon that
his revenge, inspired by the fond remarks he saw vanish behind a few scattered
clouds, would take the strange shape of a short story. He missed his old flame,
his fiery Candela.

Another blank sheet of paper
challenged Samuel to tarnish it. Too many paper cuts and green pen marks competed
with wrinkles and fingerprints for open space along his weary hands. He brushed
aside the sheets and pens with his forearm and dropped his tired head on
the desk for a minute. After what seemed like years, Samuel picked up the
antique typewriter that reposed atop three hardbound novels and tip-tapped its
loose keys: “The perfect first sentence never came easily to Samuel…”